It's not just people fleeing the Bay Area — these businesses are leaving, too

Click through the gallery to see what businesses have left the Bay Area.

Click through the gallery to see what businesses have left the Bay Area.

Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2014

Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2014

Image
1of/14

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 14

Click through the gallery to see what businesses have left the Bay Area.

Click through the gallery to see what businesses have left the Bay Area.

Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2014

It's not just people fleeing the Bay Area — these businesses are leaving, too

1 / 14

Back to Gallery

At this point, it's basically a truism that hordes of people are moving away from the Bay Area in search of sunnier, more affordable climes, yielding a U-Haul shortage and a whole mini-industry devoted to helping people relocate from the Bay Area.

It's not just people, though (unless you count corporations as people, like the Supreme Court does). There's also an exodus of businesses, some say.

From Chevron to the North Face to Jamba Juice, recent years have seen a number of high-profile relocations of headquarters and downsizing of Bay Area offices, with companies citing factors such as relatively high taxes, burdensome regulations, and labor costs that must keep pace with a sky-high cost of living.

Some other states are actively targeting California companies. Arizona launched one such effort in 2013, after Californians approved a tax hike. Texas, too, has tried to seduce companies away from California.

Click through the gallery above for a roundup of businesses that have left or announced plans to do so.

The Bay Area Council, a business advocacy group, bristles at the implication that companies are fleeing.

"The Bay Area regional economy became the world's 18th largest economy in just the past few months," council president Micah Weinberg told the San Francisco Business Times earlier this fall.

"Just stop it with this," he added on Twitter. "Bay Area economy is still on fire. More companies coming than leaving."

But some expect departures to pick up, as Trump's changes to the tax code cap deductions for state and local taxes.

Sometimes the choice of new location seems designed to be salt in the wound, right down to the name. When Jamba Juice moved its headquarters from the Bay Area to Texas, they picked a city whose very name has a nails-on-chalkboard quality to many around these parts: Frisco.